With the rapid rise in use of digital cameras and personal computers, the need to display digital images in an attractive manner is becoming increasingly prevalent. A slide show is one example of a means to display digital images and satisfy this need. A printed photograph is another example of a means to display digital images. Existing techniques for displaying digital images according to these and other methods typically assume that the viewable saliency in any portion of an image viewing region such as, for example, on a screen or in a printed photograph, is uniform. That is, the quantity of visible saliency is important, while the arrangement of the saliency in the viewing region is irrelevant.
A technique utilizing such an assumption about the uniform distribution of visible saliency will typically display of a salient portion of a digital image by tightly cropping around a salient feature and enlarging the salient feature to fill as much of a viewing region as possible. Such a technique is typically successful in cropping an image such that a large amount of image saliency is preserved and displayed within a viewing region. However, such a technique will rarely (except by happenstance) lead to the display of an image in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing according to an established rule of image composition or according to the aesthetic desires of a user. As such, users often find image layouts generated by existing automated image layout techniques to be bland or uninspiring.
A possible solution is to manually layout and/and or crop images to create more aesthetically pleasing results. However, such manual layout and cropping of digital images is both tedious and time consuming.
As the prevalence of digital images increase, so does the need for a solution to easily present these digital images in a pleasing manner. However, as described, existing techniques for laying out and/or cropping images are tedious and time consuming or only rarely deliver results which may be considered aesthetically pleasing according to an established rule of image composition or according to the aesthetic desires of a user.
The drawings referred to in this description should not be understood as being drawn to scale unless specifically noted.